Günther Gumpert

Günther Gumpert (* April 17, 1919 in Krefeld; † March 22, 2019) was a German-American painter of informal abstraction. He lived and worked in Washington.

Günther Gumpert was only just able to begin studying art in Krefeld and Wuppertal in 1937 before he had to live through the entire Second World War as a soldier in France, Romania and Russia. Afterwards, in Cologne, he discovered the previously repressed Modern art, in particular Paul Klee, and became involved in the circle around Rolf Jährling's legendary Wuppertal gallery Parnass.

However, life in post-war Germany was not compatible with his experiences during the war. So he went on tour to Paris, Spain, Morocco, Geneva, Zurich, Brissago, Ramatuelle, Paris again, where he had a permanent studio from 1956 to 1967, a stay in Davos due to tuberculosis, Yugoslavia, Italy, from 1960 mostly Rome, from 1967 permanently in Washington. A nomad who sang his painterly song of wonderfully lyrical abstraction wherever he went.

Gumpert lived the inner necessity of the Great Abstraction more intensely than almost anyone else, which in the crisis year of 1948, when everything collapsed for the second time in the outbreak of the Cold War, became a global style, a world conflagration. When the full extent of the catastrophe, now including all aspects of the Holocaust, was recognized, art had only one response: speechlessness. For almost two decades and for this generation, it was no longer possible to depict reality or figures, let alone people. Nevertheless, abstraction became the "world language", the only one that art had ever known. Gumpert is one of its great poets.